The Potential Green Effects of Going Open Source
This page last reviewed July 15, 2008
The following quote is lifted from the United Kingdom - Office of Government Commerce: Open Source Software Trials in Government - Final Report (Issued October 2004) re: the "green effects" of going Open Source. There are many well known rationales for selecting open source such as cost, stability, speed and ease of accessing software tools, security, etc. Is it possible to both "blow up boxes" as Governor Schwarzenegger has mandated and at the same time do something helpful for the environment? Being a governmental environmental agency, it is reasonable for the California Air Resources Board to want to consider the environmental impacts of open source vs. proprietary software. Needless to say, we were heartened and a bit surprised to run across the following citation.
5.5 Hardware resources and the Green agenda
One of the benefits frequently put forward for the use of Open Source Software is the level of resources needed to support it. This means that for equivalent Open Source and Microsoft Windows systems, the Open Source system will require less memory and a slower processor speed for the same functionality.
Open Source operating systems such as Linux do not usually have the regular major upgrades that are a feature of Windows, and thus do not have the requirement that goes with these upgrades for a new or upgraded computer to run them. This means that a computer running Linux can have a significantly longer working life than an equivalent computer running Windows. This has the potential to impact significantly on costs, including purchase of software and hardware, and indirectly by reducing business disruption whilst implementing change and upgrading. There are also potential Green Agenda benefits, through reducing the energy and resources consumed in manufacturing replacement equipment, and reducing landfill requirements and costs arising from disposal of redundant equipment.
Industry observers quote a typical hardware refresh period for Microsoft Windows systems as 3-4 years; a major UK manufacturing organisation quotes its hardware refresh period for Linux systems as 6-8 years.
So, do we take this claim at face value?
We have put together a Green Computing Initiatives - A Short Bibliography on this subject, and although there are reasons to suggest that the above claim is correct, we are on the hunt for more material on this subject, pro and con. If you have any suggested links, please contact webmaster@arb.ca.gov.
Open Standards / Open Source Software Initiatives